Biblio

With the development of network technology, identifying specific traffic has become important in network monitoring and security. However, designing feature sets that can accurately describe network traffic is still an urgent problem. Most of existing researches cannot realize effectively the identification of targets, and don't perform well in the complex and dynamic network environment. Aiming at these problems, we propose a novel method in this paper, which learns correlation features of network traffic based on the hierarchical structure. Firstly, the method learns the spatial-temporal features using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and the bidirectional long short-term memory networks (Bi-LSTMs), then builds network topology to capture dependency characteristics between sessions and learns the context-related features through the graph attention networks (GATs). Finally, the network traffic session is classified using a fully connected network. The experimental results show that our method can effectively improve the detection ability and achieve a better classification performance overall.

Anonymity is one of the biggest concerns in web security and traffic management. Though web users are concerned about privacy and security various methods are being adopted in making the web more vulnerable. Browsing the web anonymously not only threatens the integrity but also questions the motive of such activity. It is important to classify the network traffic and prevent source and destination from hiding with each other unless it is for benign activity. The paper proposes various methods to classify the dark web at different levels or hierarchies. Various preprocessing techniques are proposed for feature selection and dimensionality reduction. Anon17 dataset is used for training and testing the model. Three levels of classification are proposed in the paper based on the network, traffic type, and application.

The widespread use of powerful mobile devices has deeply affected the mix of traffic traversing both the Internet and enterprise networks (with bring-your-own-device policies). Traffic encryption has become extremely common, and the quick proliferation of mobile apps and their simple distribution and update have created a specifically challenging scenario for traffic classification and its uses, especially network-security related ones. The recent rise of Deep Learning (DL) has responded to this challenge, by providing a solution to the time-consuming and human-limited handcrafted feature design, and better clas-sification performance. The counterpart of the advantages is the lack of interpretability of these black-box approaches, limiting or preventing their adoption in contexts where the reliability of results, or interpretability of polices is necessary. To cope with these limitations, eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques have seen recent intensive research. Along these lines, our work applies XAI-based techniques (namely, Deep SHAP) to interpret the behavior of a state-of-the-art multimodal DL traffic classifier. As opposed to common results seen in XAI, we aim at a global interpretation, rather than sample-based ones. The results quantify the importance of each modality (payload- or header-based), and of specific subsets of inputs (e.g., TLS SNI and TCP Window Size) in determining the classification outcome, down to per-class (viz. application) level. The analysis is based on a publicly-released recent dataset focused on mobile app traffic.

With the rapid development of traffic encryption technology and the continuous emergence of various network services, the classification of encrypted zero-day applications has become a major challenge in network supervision. More seriously, many attackers will utilize zero-day applications to hide their attack behaviors and make attack undetectable. However, there are very few existing studies on zero-day applications. Existing works usually select and label zero-day applications from unlabeled datasets, and these are not true zero-day applications classification. To address the classification of zero-day applications, this paper proposes an Encrypted Zero-day Applications Classification (EZAC) method that combines Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and K-Means, which can effectively classify zero-day applications. We first use CNN to classify the flows, and for the flows that may be zero-day applications, we use K-Means to divide them into several categories, which are then manually labeled. Experimental results show that the EZAC achieves 97.4% accuracy on a public dataset (CIC-Darknet2020), which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

The rapid growth of IPv6 traffic makes security issues become more important. This paper proposes an IPv6 network security system that integrates signature-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and machine learning classification technologies to improve the accuracy of IPv6 denial-of-service (DoS) attacks detection. In addition, this paper has also enhanced IPv6 network security defense capabilities through software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) technologies. The experimental results prove that the detection and defense mechanisms proposed in this paper can effectively strengthen IPv6 network security.

Accurate traffic classification is fundamentally important for various network activities such as fine-grained network management and resource utilisation. Port-based approaches, deep packet inspection and machine learning are widely used techniques to classify and analyze network traffic flows. However, over the past several years, the growth of Internet traffic has been explosive due to the greatly increased number of Internet users. Therefore, both port-based and deep packet inspection approaches have become inefficient due to the exponential growth of the Internet applications that incurs high computational cost. The emerging paradigm of software-defined networking has reshaped the network architecture by detaching the control plane from the data plane to result in a centralised network controller that maintains a global view over the whole network on its domain. In this paper, we propose a new deep learning model for software-defined networks that can accurately identify a wide range of traffic applications in a short time, called Deep-SDN. The performance of the proposed model was compared against the state-of-the-art and better results were reported in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and f-measure. It has been found that 96% as an overall accuracy can be achieved with the proposed model. Based on the obtained results, some further directions are suggested towards achieving further advances in this research area.

Information systems are becoming more and more complex and closely linked. These systems are encountering an enormous amount of nefarious traffic while ensuring real - time connectivity. Therefore, a defense method needs to be in place. One of the commonly used tools for network security is intrusion detection systems (IDS). An IDS tries to identify fraudulent activity using predetermined signatures or pre-established user misbehavior while monitoring incoming traffic. Intrusion detection systems based on signature and behavior cannot detect new attacks and fall when small behavior deviations occur. Many researchers have proposed various approaches to intrusion detection using machine learning techniques as a new and promising tool to remedy this problem. In this paper, the authors present a combination of two machine learning methods, unsupervised clustering followed by a supervised classification framework as a Fast, highly scalable and precise packets classification system. This model's performance is assessed on the new proposed dataset by the Canadian Institute for Cyber security and the University of New Brunswick (CICIDS2017). The overall process was fast, showing high accuracy classification results.

Nowadays, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been depending on Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) approaches, which are the most precise techniques for traffic identification and classification. However, constructing high performance DPI approaches imposes a vigilant and an in-depth computing system design because the demands for the memory and processing power. Membership query data structures, specifically Bloom filter (BF), have been employed as a matching check tool in DPI approaches. It has been utilized to store signatures fingerprint in order to examine the presence of these signatures in the incoming network flow. The main issue that arise when employing Bloom filter in DPI approaches is the need to use k hash functions which, in turn, imposes more calculations overhead that degrade the performance. Consequently, in this paper, a new design and implementation for a DPI approach have been proposed. This DPI utilizes a membership query data structure called Cuckoo filter (CF) as a matching check tool. CF has many advantages over BF like: less memory consumption, less false positive rate, higher insert performance, higher lookup throughput, support delete operation. The achieved experiments show that the proposed approach offers better performance results than others that utilize Bloom filter.

Traffic classification, i.e. associating network traffic to the application that generated it, is an important tool for several tasks, spanning on different fields (security, management, traffic engineering, R&D). This process is challenged by applications that preserve Internet users' privacy by encrypting the communication content, and even more by anonymity tools, additionally hiding the source, the destination, and the nature of the communication. In this paper, leveraging a public dataset released in 2017, we provide (repeatable) classification results with the aim of investigating to what degree the specific anonymity tool (and the traffic it hides) can be identified, when compared to the traffic of the other considered anonymity tools, using machine learning approaches based on the sole statistical features. To this end, four classifiers are trained and tested on the dataset: (i) Naïve Bayes, (ii) Bayesian Network, (iii) C4.5, and (iv) Random Forest. Results show that the three considered anonymity networks (Tor, I2P, JonDonym) can be easily distinguished (with an accuracy of 99.99%), telling even the specific application generating the traffic (with an accuracy of 98.00%).

This study aims to identify and quantify applications that are making use of port numbers that are typically associated with other major Internet applications (i.e. port 53, 80, 123, 443, 8000 and 8080) to bypass port-based traffic controls such as firewalls. We use lightweight packet inspection to examine each flow observed using these ports on our campus network over the course of a week in September 2015 and identify applications that are producing network traffic that does not match the expected application for each port. We find that there are numerous programs that co-opt the port numbers of major Internet applications on our campus, many of which are Chinese in origin and are not recognized by existing traffic classification tools. As a result of our investigation, new rules for identifying over 20 new applications have been made available to the research community.

Industrial Control System (ICS) consists of large number of electronic devices connected to field devices to execute the physical processes. Communication network of ICS supports wide range of packet based applications. A growing issue with network security and its impact on ICS have highlighted some fundamental risks to critical infrastructure. To address network security issues for ICS a clear understanding of security specific defensive countermeasures is required. Reconnaissance of ICS network by deep packet inspection (DPI) consists analysis of the contents of the captured packets in order to get accurate measures of process that uses specific countermeasure to create an aggregated posture. In this paper we focus on novel approach by presenting a technique with captured network traffic. This technique is capable to identify the protocols and extract different features for classification of traffic based on network protocol, header information and payload to understand the whole architecture of complex system. Here we have segregated possible types of attacks on ICS.

Botnet detection represents one of the most crucial prerequisites of successful botnet neutralization. This paper explores how accurate and timely detection can be achieved by using supervised machine learning as the tool of inferring about malicious botnet traffic. In order to do so, the paper introduces a novel flow-based detection system that relies on supervised machine learning for identifying botnet network traffic. For use in the system we consider eight highly regarded machine learning algorithms, indicating the best performing one. Furthermore, the paper evaluates how much traffic needs to be observed per flow in order to capture the patterns of malicious traffic. The proposed system has been tested through the series of experiments using traffic traces originating from two well-known P2P botnets and diverse non-malicious applications. The results of experiments indicate that the system is able to accurately and timely detect botnet traffic using purely flow-based traffic analysis and supervised machine learning. Additionally, the results show that in order to achieve accurate detection traffic flows need to be monitored for only a limited time period and number of packets per flow. This indicates a strong potential of using the proposed approach within a future on-line detection framework.